A teenage girl from the Santa Marta favela slum puts on a pair of high heels for a group debutante ball organized by the Pacifying Police Unit from her neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Friday, August 29, 2014. The ball, which relied on volunteers who coiffed and made up the girls and a formal wear shop that loaned the dresses, helped build goodwill between pacified favelas' residents and the officers who patrol them. (Photo by Silvia Izquierdo/AP Photo via The Palm Beach Post)

A model wears a floral head dress as she promotes a chain of garden centres at the Royal Horticultural Soceity's Chelsea Flower Show in London, Britain, May 18, 2015. (Photo by Toby Melville/Reuters)

An Indian Hindu devotee pours milk on a snake as an offering during the annual Nag Panchami festival, dedicated to the worship of snakes outside the Nagvasuki temple, in Allahabad, on July 28, 2017. Officially the snake charmers' profession is banned in India, but many in the country offered prayers and milk blessings to cobras and other deadly serpents on July 28 in an annual tribute. The 800,000 charmers and their young apprentices come to the fore for the Nag Panchami festival which dates back several centuries. (Photo by Sanjay Kanojia/AFP Photo)

Cara Delevingne and other models react while presenting creations by late designer Karl Lagerfeld as part of his Fall/Winter 2019-2020 women's ready-to-wear collection show for fashion house Chanel at the Grand Palais during Paris Fashion Week in Paris, France on March 5, 2019. (Photo by Regis Duvignau/Reuters)

A model presents a creation by British designer Vivienne Westwood as part of her Spring/Summer 2018 women's ready-to-wear collection show during Fashion Week in Paris, France on September 30, 2017. (Photo by Charles Platiau/Reuters)

An Afghan refugee girl shows her younger brother a calf in a slum on the outskirts of Islamabad, Pakistan, Friday, February 6, 2015. (Photo by Muhammed Muheisen/AP Photo)

A wild leopard runs on the stairs as it tries to escape from a compound of a house in Kathmandu, Nepal June 1, 2016. (Photo by Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters)

In the spring of 1965, within weeks of 3,500 American Marines arriving in Vietnam, a 39-year-old Briton named Larry Burrows began work on a feature for LIFE magazine, chronicling the day-to-day experience of U.S. troops on the ground – and in the air – in the midst of the rapidly widening war. The photographs in this gallery focus on a calamitous March 31, 1965, helicopter mission; Burrows’ “report from Da Nang”, featuring his pictures and his personal account of the harrowing operation, was published two weeks later as a now-famous cover story in the April 16, 1965, issue of LIFE.

Photo: Man your battle stations: The crew chief of helicopter Yankee Papa 13, lance corporal James C. Farley, mans an M-60 machine gun during a mission near Da Nang, Vietnam on March 31, 1965. (Photo by Larry Burrows/Time & Life Pictures)